ORIGINS: UNIVERSE, LIFE, HUMANKIND, AND DARWIN

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We debate origins of the Universe, life, Earth, humans, religion, atheism, using common sense, evolution, cosmology, geology, archaeology, and other sciences, to repel biblical creationism and other religious beliefs.

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In my case, it'll be a bit more complicated, if I ever actually get on Facebook. I mean, I would love to keep in better contact with my extended family back in Chicago. I haven't seen any of them in far too long. So, I wouldn't be keeping myself down to a limited number of contacts.

I don't know that many of my family members take their religion all that seriously ... except for my one aunt who is a nun, obviously.

But for any who are seriously Catholic, my own activities would probably be annoying. I would be shutting down any religious nonsense that they tried to stick all over my wall, but I would be posting my own anti-religious stuff. I have enough tact (barely) to not stick anti-religious stuff on their walls, but my own wall would be a presentation of my own perspective, for anyone who looked at it.

Let's be honest. There's no way I'm going to remember your address by the time I set up an account, and if I stick it somewhere for future reference, it'll just get lost in the mass of things that I have made a note of to check out later ... somewhere around here ... somewhere. I know myself too well to think that there would be any other outcome. ^.^

I'll give you a poke if that happens, though, so I can get the info from you again.

@Qiana

You might have to do a bit of digging to find the cheaper rates. It took me a good bit of searching to find the more reasonable surface-rates. I never did find anything except for air rates on the UPS website, although the surface rates are probably in there somewhere.

Priority air rates are absolutely ridiculous, coming in at at least $100, for the parameters I plugged in. Express rates were beyond ludicrous.

It's quite possible that the greater distance has an impact for you, though. I'm on the east coast of the US, fairly close to a major port. If you aren't on the east coast of Canada, then the package would have to make a few more hops, costing more.

@Dominic

Here's the big problem in your thinking, man:

We're online. There are a lot of different sorts of resources online. Some of these books that you're talking about are available in .pdf format.

Basically, if getting physical books is that difficult for you, there are so many alternative resources for you. We have the internet now, you know. If you asked about those instead of books, you might do a lot better.

Joseph P. Lol. That's cool. I have a minor love/hate relationship with Facebook. But I've resolved that by keeping the friend count small and only keeping friends I actually talk to occasionally and have things in common with. I haven't added most of my family due to the drama thing. Well, if you change your mind, at least you have my address. :)

Eh, I pick up a lot of random stuff, Raven. There's a significant jump from that to wisdom. :-P

And yeah, there has to be some sort of connection, at least. I could have and have had casual sex with one of my friends, if she was interested and it wouldn't make the friendship weird. I don't necessarily need a deep, committed bond with someone before being interested in sex.

But there has to be at least something there, yeah ... some sort of emotional bond, even if only a casual one. Sounds like your ex takes that to an even greater extreme than I do.

I can relate to the emotional issues, since my bipolar disorder kicked in when I was 11 or so. I didn't get most of my crap together until after high school. I wasn't so much shut down as much as I was in a fugue state, a lot of the time ... that or asleep a lot.

No Facebook, though. I have Google+, since that pretty much automatically comes with a GMail account, but I don't do a whole lot with it. If I had a Facebook account, it would be nonstop drama with my mostly-Catholic extended-family, I imagine.

I dunno. I keep thinking about starting one up, then think better of it before I actually do. That's been going on for several years now.

You also started off on entirely the wrong foot with me, with your talk about your wife and about the woman you broke up with before your wife.

When you said that you broke up with the one girl years ago, because your family and friends were against the relationship, and she wasn't pretty and tall, you came off as very sexist and shallow. The only positive thing that you had to say about your current wife, which makes her better than the girl you broke up with, is that she is pretty and tall.

Focusing on those things is kind of demeaning towards women. If my family and friends told me that they didn't approve of someone I was dating because she wasn't attractive enough, I would tell them to go fuck themselves. I might even start looking for some better friends.

If my family and friends disapproved because the girl was crazy and not a nice person, that would be different, but you haven't said anything of the sort.

I like your comments. Dead-on and also wise. Regarding the ex-boyfriend I was talking about, he had a strong sex drive, but didn't realize he had to be in love before he was turned on. I think a lot of "deeper" type men need some sort of intellectual connection, or at least respect before sex becomes appealing. This particular guy had a lot of emotional issues that kept him single for a longer time than normal and pushed other women away. I think he was just kind of shut down. Anyway, it's nice to meet you. If you have Facebook, my ID is skburnes.

Part of the problem is that shipping costs from the US to Nigeria are very expensive. The cheapest I was able to find, searching on the websites of a few of the package-carrying services, was $22.25 for the slowest mode, by ship. That's 4,426 Nigerian Naira.

In other words, it costs more than twice the price of a new copy of the book in order to ship it to you. Talking about cheap, used copies available doesn't matter, when shipping costs are so high. It's a pretty major thing that you're proposing.

This is just a social site. Trying to shame us with your comment about how Christians would do it is just going to piss most of us off.

Christians collect huge amounts of money every week, for the express purpose of proselytizing to people all over the world. Of course they have the spare money to do it. Most of us probably don't.

When what you're proposing is so difficult to arrange, getting physical books to you, you should look more into online resources. Lots of atheist writers have blogs with a huge amount of material on them. You'd be better off reading that sort of stuff.

The sort of guys that Raven is talking about would be a very tiny minority, Dominic. Every single one of the gay guys I know has known that he was attracted to guys since about puberty. Women tend to be a lot more fluid in their sexuality than men, on average, but you seem to be mostly focusing on guys here.

That guy could also just have a low sex drive. I'd have to know a whole lot more about him, since there are so many possible explanations. I can only wildly speculate about what his issue was.

It could also be a matter of the strip club part of things, with the guy about whom Raven is speaking. I'm really not into strip clubs, myself. Being in a crowd with a bunch of guys making noise and acting like idiots would kill it for me.

Even without the distraction of the other guys around the place, it would just make me frustrated as hell. Getting worked up without actually being able to do anything with the women involved would just make me miserable.

And those strippers who would be open to prostitution wouldn't be any help. I'm not into prostitutes, even though I support the legalization of prostitution in general. If a woman is only there for the money, I'm not interested. For me, sex is all about pleasing my partner, so if a woman wants to be paid for being there ... uh, yeah ... no, I'm not interested.

For that matter, most of the strippers I've seen aren't very appealing to me. There are some, sure, but it's generally not my sort of thing. On the whole, I'd rather just watch some lesbian porn.

On the issue of the books you're looking into, have you looked into e-books and audio books? I think that most of the ones on your list should be available in digital text or audio format.

If the books aren't available in Nigeria, wouldn't you possibly run into issues if a customs agent got a little too nosy with your package? I would think that digital would be a lot better for someone in your situation.

Dominic, I am appalled at how people treat animals (not related I know but it's still a trait humans should be embarrassed of) and each other. The punishments and general values of some countries is just so 14th century I cannot rationalize it. We have had a VERY long time to get our act together collectively yet the vast majority still demonstrate more animal behaviour than human at times. Follow my train of thought Dominic?